This invention relates to bucket wheels for material handling, e.g. for reclaiming material from stockpiles.
Bucket wheel reclaimers are known having a conveyor belt fed by a bucket wheel that rotates about an axis parallel to the conveyor and that has the conveyor projecting through its central region. As the bucket wheel rotates it is progressed along the length of the conveyor and so takes material from across the width of the stockpile. After each traversal of the bucket wheel across the stockpile, the reclaimer is advanced and the process is repeated, until the end of the stockpile has been reached.
The buckets are operative only in one direction of rotation because they gather the material by scooping it up. When the end of the stockpile is reached, it is often arranged that the reclaimer is moved by a transfer machine to a fresh stockpile while the stockpile on the original location is rebuilt. In order to rebuild the stockpile behind the reclaimer as it advances and then reverse the reclaimer to draw on the fresh material built up, it has been known to provide the bucket wheels of such reclaimers with manually releasable fastenings, so that an operator can readjust the individual buckets when the wheel rotation is to be reversed, but that is a time-consuming and unpleasant task.